After Falling into a Manhole, We Discovered Two Cases Arising from This Construction Site Injury

Some serious injuries on construction sites in D.C. mean you have both a workers’ comp case and a case against another company that caused your injury.

Driving a cement mixer all day is hard work. It takes the right kind of person to do this job – strong, dedicated, and dependable.

This is exactly the kind of person Ray is. For more than 30 years, he had been driving construction trucks, dump trucks, and cement mixers and has probably been on every construction site in the DC area during that time.

Always careful to follow directions, he was delivering concrete to a large construction site near Nats Park. The general contractor instructed them where to back up his truck because they needed a little more cement to cover the PVC tubes that would hold the utility lines (this is so if there’s ever digging in the future, the backhoe will hit a cement barrier instead of any live utility wires).

As Ray was moving the truck, one of the construction workers removed a manhole cover behind him. Because Ray had to walk backward, holding the chute to pour the concrete in the right place, he never saw that, and he fell into the open manhole.

Like most construction workers, he tried to walk it off, but within a couple of days, his hip was so painful he could barely move. An x-ray showed he had a fractured hip and had aggravated the osteoarthritis he had in that hip. He tried everything his doctor recommended, therapy, injections, medications, but needed hip replacement surgery that ended his career.

He needed two things. First was to stand up to the Workers’ Compensation insurance company to make sure he got all of the medical treatment and monetary benefits he deserved since he could no longer work because of the injury. Second was to hold the general contractor accountable for the unsafe workplace.

We see a lot of construction workers who have two cases, both a workers’ compensation claim, and a case against the company that caused their injuries. So we had the experience to help guide Ray through both cases and maximize his recovery, making sure he got the comfortable retirement he had worked so hard for and didn’t have to worry about money.

That’s what it’s all about!